"The Invisible College of the Rose Cross Fraternity," 1618, by Theophilius Schweighardt. Rusicrucianism swept Europe during the early seventeenth century.

Thomas Christensen’s 1616: The World in Motion, is one of those unconventional, unclassifiable, uniquely pleasurable histories that seems to take a narrow path but opens into a fresh, vivid, expansive understanding of a historical moment.

There are many books on single years — 1066, 1492, 1945 — but Christensen’s book was born out of an epiphany and an anomaly.

One morning in 2009, he says in his preface, he woke “with the date 1616 in my head and the resolution to research and write about that year already formed.” The idea “seemed to come out of nowhere.”

The anomaly is that both Shakespeare and Cervantes died in 1616, both on April 23 but 10 days apart. The discrepancy occurred because Spain was on the Georgian calendar, England not.

This was “a world in motion,” as the final links closed in a global network of trade and cultural exchange. The Spanish silver shipped from Acapulco to Manila traded for Chinese silk, which was all the rage in Europe. For the first time in history, all the world’s trade routes were joined.

This was the time of the Little Ice Age, decades of intense cold that touched the entire globe. In China, the period between 1615-17 is known as The Second Wanli Slough, a period of freezing, drought, famine, locusts and “encounters with dragons.” It inspired the fanciful icy landscapes painted by Dong Qichang and other artists — and in the West, Hendrick Avercamp’s paintings of Hollanders playing colf on the ice.

The largest Western Hemisphere city was Potosi, larger than London, Madrid or Rome. Set high above the tree line in the Andes, here was the source of the silver that fueled the silk trade and linked the new worldwide economy. In pursuit of which, 8 million people died.

Londoners of the time were most eager to meet John Rolfe and his wife Matoaka, better known as Pocahontas, whose visit to England, Christensen reveals, was a promotion by the Virginia Company to advance settlement in Virginia.

It was the time of Kepler, of Galileo’s trial, of Rubens, and a hundred different artists and astronomers, rulers and sailors, and stray memorable figures that Christensen illuminates in a page or two, or in one of his lengthy captions.

This is a book that’s nothing but digressive, and at the same time something much more than a collection of pieces and digressions. Page by page, a continuity unfolds, a sense of the time, and the worldview of extraordinary and ordinary people alike.

Nearly every page is illustrated and the illustrations are lavish, most in full color, all aptly chosen. The captions are fascinating, too, and not to be missed. This is a book to delve into, and explore, and get lost by the hour.